The changing face of citizen engagement

Before the webinar began, Content Guru asked attendees to take a survey about their organization’s response to the coronavirus crisis. Over half of the public sector participants marked ‘managing multiple communications channels whilst working from home’ as the pandemic’s greatest professional challenge. ‘The immediate need to implement homeworking’ came in second place with 28% of the audience’s vote. Addressing these results, Martin commented that both of these issues can be resolved by moving to a cloud-based system for citizen engagement. A cloud Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) solution allows an organization to immediately scale up their services to handle spikes in demand. It can also enable the unification of all communication channels into a single interface. This interface can be accessed from any internet-enabled device, enabling agents to work from home without upheaval.

For organizations that don’t have the flexibility of cloud, the disruption of Coronavirus is set to continue into the foreseeable future, with staggered lockdowns on the horizon. When the Coronavirus pandemic hit the UK, Sheffield City Council was already in the process of streamlining its IT equipment to facilitate homeworking, as well as moving to a cloud-based CX solution with the help of Content Guru. These changes allowed the council to deftly dodge the considerable upheaval that many other public sector organizations faced during the crisis. A cloud-based system also gave Sheffield the ability to provision new services rapidly, and adapt its front-line citizen communications quickly to last-minute government changes, all whilst staff were working from home.

During the webinar, the audience were asked to complete a survey on the tools they found most useful in handling the Coronavirus pandemic. With a landslide victory, 79% of participants voted for ‘digital communication channels’. Handling citizen contacts through digital channels can play a huge role in reducing queue wait times, and opening up the possibility for automation and self-service. 25% of Sheffield City Council’s citizen communications are carried out via its live online presence, the development of which was a major part of the council’s 2020 CX strategy. Through its automated online service, Sheffield are able to receive and field applications for business grants, and requests for community care packages, as well as push out proactive messaging to citizens. Martin noted that, with the implementation of a chatbot, organizations can entirely automate many relatively complex questions, allowing time-conscious citizens to have their queries resolved rapidly.

Making proactive contact with citizens can vastly reduce call wait times. Martin mentioned that, when Content Guru implemented proactive SMS messaging for clients in the electricity sector, the number of calls coming into their contact center dropped by an astonishing 50%. This functionality is now more important than ever for public sector organizations. Due to the pandemic, many local authorities have suddenly found that their list of vulnerable citizens has grown to staggering proportions. Ensuring that these citizens continue to receive priority service requires intelligent contact routing, advanced CRM functionality, and targeted proactive outreach tools. Simon commented on how Content Guru has helped Sheffield City Council to transition away from a legacy, on-premise CRM solution, to a new, cloud-based CRM functionality. The integration of this advanced citizen knowledge management and CRM tool into Sheffield’s communications estate was completed during lockdown, and allows Sheffield to ensure that they can provide vulnerable citizens with the care they need.